My Miracle Part 2: THE ORIGINS OF LANGUAGE CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT

SUMMARY CHAPTER REPORT

THE ORIGINS OF LANGUAGE CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT

Submitted to fulfill on of the requirement of Curriculum and Material Development

Lecturer: Yayan Suryana, Drs. M.Pd.

Written by :

Ditha Febrivania_{(III B)}

NPM. 108060053

ENGLISH EDUCATIONAL DEPARTMENT

TEACHING AND EDUCATIONAL SCIENCES FACULTY

SWADAYA GUNUNG JATI UNIVERSITY

2011

Historical Background

A syllabus is a specification of the content of the course of instruction and lists what will be thaught and tested. While syllabus design is the process of developing a syllabus. Then, curriculum development is a more comprehensive process than syllabus design. It includes the processes that are used to determine the needs of a group learners, to develop aims or objectives for a program to address those needs, to determine an appropriate syllabus, course structure, teaching methods, and materials, and to carry out an evaluation of the language program that results from these processes.

Many methods have come and gone in the last 100 years in pursuit of the ”best method”, as the following chronology illustraters, with dates suggesting periods of greatest dominance:

· Grammar Translation Method (1800-1900)

· Direct Method (1890-1930)

· Structural Method (1930-1960)

· Reading Method (1920-1950)

· Audiolingual Method (1950-1970)

· Situational Method (1950-1970)

· Communicative Approach (1970-Present)

The oral-based method known as the Direct Method, which developed in opposition to the Grammar Translation Method in the late of the nineteenth centur, prescribes not only the way a language should be taught, with an emphasis on the exclusive use of the target language, intensive question-and-answer teaching techniques, and demonstration and dramatization to communicate meanings of words; it also prescribes the vocabulary and grammar to be taught and the order in which it should be presented.

Harrold Palmer summarized the principles of language teaching methodology at that time as follows:

1. Initial preparation

2. Habit-forming

3. Accuracy

4. Gradation

5. Proportion

6. Concreteness

7. Interest

8. Order of Progression

9. Multiple line of approach

(Palmer {1922} 1968, 38-39)

Vocabulary Selection

Voabulary is one of the most obvious component of language and one of the first things applied linguists turned their attention to.

Some of the earliest approaches to vocabulary selection involved counting large collections of texts to determine the frequency with which words occured, since it would be seem obvious that words of highest frequency should be taught first.

Word frequencies are important in planning word lists for language teaching. But frequency is not necessarily the same things as usefulness because the frequency of words depends on the types of language samples that are analyed. The most frequent words occuring in samples of sports writing will not be the same as those occuring in fiction.

Other chriteria were therefore also used in determinigng word lists. These included:

Teachability

Similarity

Availaability

Coverage

Defining power

The procedures of vocabulary selection lead to the compilation of a basic vocabulary, that is a target vocabulary for a language course usually grouped or graded into levels, such as the first 500 words, the second 500 words, and so on.

Grammar Selection and gradation

The need for a systematic approach selsecting grammar for teaching purposes was also a priority for applied linguists from the 1920s. The number of any syntactic structures in a language is a large, as is seen from the contents any grammar books.

The following principles have been used or suggested as a basis for deveoping grammatical syllabuses.

Simplicity and centrality

Frequency

Subject and verb ellipsis

Tails

Reporting verbs

Learnability

In addition to decisions about which grammatical items to nclude in any sylabus, the sequencing or gradation of grammatical items has to be determined. The need to sequence course content in a systematic way is by no means a recent concern.

The following approaches to gradation are possible:

Linguistic distance